anaconda469 wrote: »

Happened again, July 14th activity https://www.strava.com/activities/641054733 not picked up by CycLeagues and I finished that ride at 1330 hrs PST. Does the site not like me anymore???

anaconda469 wrote: »

The above activity finally posted to the league and tour spreadsheet. Is it now going to take 6/7 hours for my data to post? I check this everyday, started having problems on the 13th.

can I just ask for a little patience here everyone...

first of all, this is, as Jason says, a free service - the CycLeagues system has been written from the ground up by Jason, he's paying for the hosting of the service out of his own pocket, certainly more than we pay a month for a premium Strava account...

Second - the whole process is not quite as simple as just "book your ride in on Strava and it magically appears", at least to those of us who have some access "under the hood"

First of all, there's a process that checks Strava on a very regular basis - just "looks to see if there's been an update by anyone who's a member of the CycLeagues group". If it sees an update, then this triggers a routine to pull over that ride into the Cycleagues Database.

Second, once in the database, theres more manipulation done - so the ride can be allocated against various different challenges - so, only rides by the riders on the TdF challenge are allocated to that "pool", and are spit out into a text file that the google spreadsheet works on.

Once in that TXT file, the google spreadsheet goes to work - Google keep their terms of service a little vague, but say that links to external files are refreshed approximately once per hour, though they reserve the right to vary that frequency, especially if the update is an intensive one (it's to stop people using a Google sheet as a once-per-minute stock ticker or suchlike...)

And finally, once the raw data is in the spreadsheet, it passes out into the summary, leaderboard and all the other pages. HOWEVER, all the formatting, checking of consecutive rides for the "ride every day of the tour" bit, sorting of the leaderboard into the various jerseys and allocating points for the combined - well - that relies on manual intervention from me - and if I'm not in front of a computer, then it won't get done.

the problem we've had is that the very first stage - the "paging Strava" process is hosted at the moment on a server that occasionally "hangs/falls over" - this server is at Jasons place of work, not at a paid server farm, so, basically only he can give the system the "nudge" it needs - I believe this was done for simplicity in the first instance, because of the "beta test" nature of the whole system - I know that I've discussed it with him, and getting it onto a server that's more robust IS something that's definitely "on the list", but will require more time, a few re-writes, and (I'm guessing here, but it's normally the case) more expenditure to upgrade the server hosting to an account that can support the additional bandwidth of the "paging" and also that will allow "real time" processes to be launched on the server.

Yes, it is an annoyance when a system fails - that it's worked faultlessly for the first 10 days, then falls over 2 days running is a bit of a nuisance - but it's hardly life or death. There's 1 person that can fix things when it goes wrong - he's doing his best, but he's here in the UK, in a different time-zone to well over half the people in the challenge. Oh - and he's away from computers or servers or anything of that nature now until Monday - so if it stops updating, the whole spreadsheet and everything else will stop changing as well - i'll do my best to keep people informed on my newsfeed, and in this thread - but PLEASE, don't *kitten*, whinge, whine, moan complain about it - because theres nothing we can do until Jason gets back to work on monday and kickstarts the server again.


Don't forget, it's free folks, and there's a couple of us giving up masses of our own time (and paying for the privilege of doing so...) to make it happen for all of you.